Our Story

We started our daily email newsletter and website Red for the Blue after a bracing post-election coffee shop lunch in January. Like many, we were blown away by Donald Trump’s win. What we had been reading did not explain what we were seeing.

We knew that we needed to get outside our carefully curated world of left-leaning news in order to find out what the people voting for Trump were reading and listening. Why were they not alarmed by the same things we were? We knew fake news was part of the problem, but that could not be the sole explanation.

Many of our friends felt the same way; however, a significant number of them did not have the time nor, frankly, the stomach to wade through the hyper-polarized news from conservative and alt-right sources.

That’s when we realized that we could offer a growing population of Left-leaning readers a service by offering a comprehensive survey and analysis of news coming from right-leaning sources, focusing on outlets often overlooked by and invisible to the mainstream press.

Our newsletter, Red for the Blue, covers the daily messages of influential talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, and the powerful alt-right outlets such as Breitbart and Independent Journalism Review. We also scrutinize self-made pundits and influencers across Twitter and other social media platforms, as well as newsletters circulated under the radar by conservative organizations and Congressmen. And of course, we keep our eye out for trending fake news, as well.

Our hope is that Red for the Blue will arm readers with the knowledge to facilitate constructive, face-to-face political discourse.

WHO WE ARE

Leslie Kaufman has been a reporter for over 25 years. She covered politics for Newsweek but spent the last 16 years of her reporting career at The New York Times, where her last beat was digital media. Follow her on Twitter at @leslieatlarge and on Linkedin here.

Jennifer Bassett is a content strategist and editor with 10+ years of experience working for brands, publishers, agencies, and media companies. She started her career as a book editor. Follow her on Twitter @jabers and on Linkedin here.

Red for the Blue is a labor of love. We're always thrilled to receive donations via Patreon.

Good Friday to you. Since Trump’s visit to Helsinki, concern has grown over the security of our voting process from hacking. We will get into some of the politicized arguments about whom such hacking would favor but before we do we want to note that there is one sure way to not have your vote count: That is not to cast it.

Happy Thursday. Well, even by Trump's standards, his tweet storm this morning was a doozy. After denying for months that he knew anything about the hush payments made by his lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels, Trump admitted that he not only knew about it, but that he reimbursed Cohen through monthly retainer payments. This confession was, of course, previewed during last night’s interview between Sean Hannity and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. It seems to be a new legal strategy on the part of the president. His team argues that because Trump used his own money, it is not a campaign violation.

Good Thursday to you. We’ve been thinking a lot about the upcoming Women’s March and how it feels different one year later. A year ago, we -- and many among our families and friends -- took to the streets in droves. Back then, the march felt like an all-inclusive protest against Trump. It was both unifying and cathartic. This year, we don’t feel the urgency of public demonstration. The shock of Trump is over and to us it seems that the time to protest is over and the time to roll up our sleeves has come.

Good Thursday to you. Wednesday felt as if it might be a watershed moment to us. The passing of the tax bill may have been President Trump’s first legislative victory -- arguably a modest achievement for an administration whose party also controls Congress -- but across the conservative press it heralded a new acceptance of the president.

Good Thursday to you. Over the weekend, The Washington Post and The New York Times ran stories revealing that Special Counsel Robert Mueller demoted one of his investigators, Peter Strzok, last summer after he learned Strzok had sent anti-Trump texts to a colleague on his team. The Mainstream Media then largely left the story there -- a staffer misbehaved and then was reassigned. Done. In the alternative conservative media universe, however, it was as if a bomb went off.

Good Thursday. For all their complaints about the bias of the Mainstream Media, we couldn’t help but notice that for most of October the conservative press has been dining out on the hard-earned reporting of their so-called “fake news” cousins. The three stories that have dominated their pages all broke in traditional newspapers.

Good Thursday. Before we get into the news, we have some scheduling changes to discuss. We launched this newsletter in February. For us, it has been a labor of love, and we have been gratified to have earned so many devoted readers.

Good Thursday to you. We hope the solar eclipse gave you a brief respite in our ongoing national melee. Here, in New York, the eclipse barely made it to three-quarters full. Still, we enjoyed every minute. But as soon as it ended, we returned to the madness:

Good Thursday to you. All week we struggled with our decision to take time off and publish once weekly in August. Like everyone else, we watched the violence in Charlottesville in horror. Despite all the ink spilled on this topic, we still have our two cents to add. We’ve skipped the worst from the Right, like the attacks on Heather Heyer, the young woman mowed down by the car, and the conspiracy theories that the Nazi marchers were actually liberals who wanted to embarrass the Right. We’ve focused on how Trump’s arguments and reasoning actually reflected thinking we’ve seen for awhile in the Right media.